The flapping of dozens of pairs of wings. The hum of passing traffic. The heavy rumble of a train as it passes overhead.

If you've never heard what a train sounds like from under a bridge, I wouldn't say I'd recommend it. Personally, it seems to resemble rolling thunder, if the thunder were sounding through a megaphone, mere inches from my ear. In my humble opinion, the ruckus is so anxiety inducing, it sends a shiver down my spine every time that I'm forced to hear it and I pray to any god willing to strain its ear through the static, to keep my soul intact.

In the moments before the train rolls by, I can feel it, the sound, building under my feet. In the moments after the train has stopped and the noise has paused, I take a deep breath and hold it. As the train bellows away, wheels screeching against the rails, cars click-clacking back and forth overhead, I exhale and shake it off.

It's a noise so loud it burrows into skin and radiates through bone. A noise so loud I can taste it. Copper and dry mouth, like cotton stuffed under my lips and pennies stuck between my teeth...

smudges of pale blur develop familiar angles, grey becomes colour, demonic figures and discarded figments of imagination slowly morph into things; a lamp, a book, the leg of the bed... as diluted photons -tired, perhaps? it is a long way from the centre of the solar system; imagine over 170 thousand years of emission and fusion from and into ions and atoms just to be created, just to be ejected (alone) into the universe- seep through the pores of a hanging fabric to infinitely -or perhaps finitely- carry on

materialisation; the coming into being (what is being?)

perhaps the universe is an energy

and it starts, the crossover; the transition from restless numbness as the photons bounce off inches of skin, as the nightly manifestations of the mind evaporate, as the life -merely hours ago- fluttering over an unconsciousness clasps and possesses... pain is it the head? the shoulders? the limbs? not sharp, not piercing: existent.

pain as the blood that circulates and mobilises, dull yet heavy like balls of lead that has long made a home out of the fingertips, the toes, and the heart

a synchronicity of connected-detached happenings; the waking of the world (but it never really goes to sleep) and that of the voices, the hollow within; it has a face and an existence, and sometimes it speaks through a once familiar vocal apparatus

perhaps it is a parallelism of things

in any way, whatever it is, however it may be, the stream of the indefinite continuous progress of existence brings forth yet another 'day'

Refuse to be labeled, tell them, tell the mirror that your value is intrinsic; it stems from you.

All she wanted was days when air didn't feel like sharp knives cutting through her lungs; days when she felt existent, unblurred, alive.

I want to effervesce away into the wind.

But if time were to halt, if the earth were to stop its calculated spinning, if the universe were to pause today, all that would be left of me are those half-finished thoughts, those half-finished paintings; those unlived lives.

-dreams are visual manifestations of buried nostalgia; the subconscious's house of mirrors. They hold no meaning- "I saw her last night", she would say, and something inside of her would stir; acid corroding reason, dissolving logic. "You're the only one she visits", the acid would reply. "She comes for you, she blames me for your anxiety"... and the acid would morph into something heavy, as if crystallised into rocks of guilt.

"We are born free", they say, not noticing the bell jar under which they were trapped, millions of years ago, before conception, before everything, an entrapment as ancient as the humankind; a snow globe of 'factors', geography, culture, language, history, connotations, your eyes, your hair, the shape of your nose, the texture of your skin, classifications, categories, politics, what's 'right' and what's 'wrong'. Hell, Heaven, Nothing. We are a continuity, born into bell jars into which the world has blown its stale breath... Walls, invisible mental blocks behind which lies non-regurgitated air; 'freedom'.

Her shoes finally soak through and the water is dripping in the space behind her ears from the hair. She runs her fingers through it to get it out of her eyes. As she pulled away, a single piece of it clung to her fingers and she examines it quietly as we walk along. She looks so peaceful just now. Not that she ever looks anything other than that. But I guess I’d say she was always still, rather that peaceful. The two are not the same. I told her that, that peaceful and still are not the same and she glances at me, and though her face really doesn’t move, I can see the softness in her eyes. She likes the rain. I remember her telling me once about the smell of rain and the way it makes her spine tingle, like something is coming, without the anxiety of it arriving. I’d laughed at the time. It was exactly the sort of thing she’d say, reverent and unaware of its eloquence. I couldn’t laugh now, just admire the fleeting softness and the way she was dripping in the downpour. Her feet make squelching noises in her shoes and her clothes are hanging heavily from her body. She looks so thin and I suggest that we should grab some dinner while we’re out, but she doesn’t really seem to like the idea. I say that we’ve come all this way and weathered the rain, we deserve an award, but her only response is to finger the end of the sleeves of her sweatshirt, where the ribbing is stretched and the elastic rendered useless from age. It’s a ratty old sweatshirt and I think she should throw it away, but she wears it so often that I don’t say anything to her about it aloud. It wouldn’t be worth it. Not now, when the rain is falling so directly upon us and her eyes are all softness, despite how much she blinks to keep the water out of her eyes. Her hair is in strands and I can see the hair that she pulled still caught between her fingers. I say that I think that the rain will never let up and that I think that I too shall become a puddle if it does not relent and her eyes soften. I think if she were to speak, she would tell me that a puddle would be an excellent state of existence, filling up and then evaporating, to later become a puddle once more. I tell her that to be a puddle would be an excellent state of existence and I think that she finds the assertion trite, but not so strongly as that, perhaps. Her shoes are soaked through and her feet squelch within them. Her fingers push the hair behind her ears, sopping up the rain that collects and cascades there.

“I looked through the window at the palm tree standing in the courtyard of our house and I knew that all was still well in life. I looked at its strong straight trunk, at its roots that strike down into the ground, at the green branches hanging down loosely over its top, and I experienced a feeling of assurance. I felt not like a storm-swept feather but like that palm tree, a being with a background, with roots, with a purpose."- A Book.

I had a rush of a feeling, as I read and reread -and reread- that excerpt, a feeling resembling a nostalgia for something I've never experienced. Like a homesickness for a 'home' that's never existed... It's strange, being human.

I've always been a little envious of those who seemed inextricably connected to something bigger than themselves, of those who related to a background or have taken it upon themselves to embody a culture; a series of customs, things that 'must' be performed, ways in which those things are performed, people to whom it all made sense. I've always been a little envious of those who have a predefined, concrete meaning of 'home'.

Well, envious of and annoyed with.

Why do we feel obligated to act in accordance to a set of predesigned morals? Is it the convenience of fitting into pret-a-porter molds instead of undergoing the existential anguish of being your own person?

What if I identify as that storm-swept feather?

It is fascinating, how the notion of roots fluctuates sometimes between feelings of suffocation, paralysis, and repression and those of warmth and acceptance. But really how accepting is conditional acceptance?

Perhaps it's the image of a 'security blanket' I'm occasionally a little envious of; the feeling it generates; that you are an inseparable molecule, woven into something that predates you and will continue to exist long after you have ceased... perhaps in a way that is the closest we get to immortality. Perhaps it's the closest we get to not being alone.

But in a time where everything and everyone seem to be swallowed by a system or another, and we seem to no longer ponder the meaning of things, I'd rather stay a storm-swept feather. Free, light, wandering. However forgettable I may be, I am still ultimately an inextricably intricate part of an inextricably intricate ecological system that does not bother with who I am or how I look or the concepts I choose or those I reject; and when my bones decay and I am one with earth, my atoms will mix with those of trees or scatter as dust, and everywhere will be 'home'.